Colum McCann Quotes

Remembering our past, carrying it around with us always, may be the necessary requirement for maintaining, as they say, the wholeness of the self. To ensure that the self doesn’t shrink, to see that it holds on to its volume, memories have to be watered like potted flowers, and the watering calls for regular contact with the witnesses of the past, that is to say, with friends. They are our mirror; our memory; we ask nothing of them but that they polish the mirror from time to time so we can look at ourselves in it.

You can revisit - the wonderful thing about my job is you can revisit your 22-year-old self or your 24-year-old self any particular night you want. The songs pick up some extra resonance, I hope, but they're still - they're there, and I can revisit that period of my life when I choose. So it's quite a nice experience.

I like to spend time in the past, with the things that have been important to me.

I think you save things from your past that you don't quite understand, and you put them in a box, and you save them for later until you can unwrap them and try to understand what they meant.

When I think about it, 20 years really seems like a blink of an eye sometimes. I wish I would have made a more concerted effort to enjoy things along the way.

…she remembered watching a summer sunset from this very spot. Not so long ago; just a lifetime.

And your own life while it's happening to you never has any atmosphere until it's a memory.

We all have appointments with the past.

Regrets and Mistakes, they're Memories made

I look at the past and I see myself.

I think what you notice most when you haven’t been home in a while is how much the trees have grown around your memories.

I miss Seattle a lot. It was my first city that I lived in on my own. It was a great city to play for. It was unfortunate for the fans what happened, but it’s time to move on. I’m sure they’ve moved on. But in the back of my mind, I still have a thing for Seattle and always am going to remember what they’ve done for me.

There is a stage you reach, Deagle thinks, a time somewhere in early middle age, when your past ceases to be about yourself. Your connection to your former life is like a dream or delirium, and that person who you once were is merely a fond acquaintance, or a beloved character from a storybook. This is how memory becomes nostalgia. They are two very different things - the same way that a person is different from a photograph of a person.

I think memory is the most important asset of human beings. It's a kind of fuel; it burns and it warms you. My memory is like a chest: There are so many drawers in that chest, and when I want to be a fifteen-year-old boy, I open up a certain drawer and I find the scenery I saw when I was a boy in Kobe. I can smell the air, and I can touch the ground, and I can see the green of the trees. That's why I want to write a book.

I will never, ever regret the things I've done. Because most days, all you have are places in your memory that you can go to.

Nostalgia doesn't make sense, because it's like bringing the memories back to be a special part of my day or to be part of my week. And I'm inside my memories the same way I'm inside my everyday life.

It's all still there in heart and soul. The walk, the hills, the sky, the solitary pain and pleasure-they will grow larger, sweeter, lovelier in the days and years to come.

The past is no farther away than your pillow.

I wanted to write what I remembered to be true.

When you leave a beautiful place, you carry it with you wherever you go.

I think sometimes in life we rush and only later look back and say, 'Wow, that was something pretty cool that I did,' and we realize we should have been more aware while it was happening.

It's hard to watch something you've done many years ago.

I keep my scrapbooks in the car. When I come to a stoplight, I start looking through my past. Sometimes I wish the red lights were longer.

I've had quite a life, when you stop and think about it.

I don't have a great nostalgia for the past.